Saturday, August 20, 2016

Pepper Biscuits and White Sausage Gravy

This post is inspired by one of my favorite concepts: breakfast for dinner. Growing up we would often get breakfast for dinner as a special treat. It usually meant eggs and some kind of vehicle for New York’s spectacular maple syrup (my mom’s banana walnut and blueberry pancakes stand out as favorites). I usually enjoy savory fare for breakfast, especially given the price of real maple syrup here on the West coast. So, instead of trying out pancakes or french toast I’ve decided to add one of my favorite breakfasts to our menu: biscuits and gravy with a perfectly fried egg. While visiting my badass ship captain/carpenter/former lobsterman sister in Maine we stopped in at a little diner in Portland. As we approached the diner I could smell the wonderful aroma of sausage gravy and I had a feeling I was about to encounter a popular American classic: biscuits and gravy. It was indeed on the menu and it was absolutely delicious! Soft, fluffy New England style biscuits made a perfect vehicle for luscious, flavorful sausage gravy. Rich, runny egg yolk from a perfectly over-medium fried egg brought the combination together in a decadent, mouthwatering way.

I’ve been thinking about putting breakfast for dinner on my weekly menu ever since I planned a weekly menu for a good friend of mine who daily cooks dinner for her husband and two young daughters. We’ll call her R. I feel pretty harried cruising the aisles of the grocery store with just one cute little wriggler, much less two, so I try to plan the menu for the entire week and buy most of my groceries in one trip. This is an entirely new experience for me, as I previously mainly cooked to develop recipes for the blog. When I became a mom I was suddenly filled with the yearning to make us a home cooked meal every night. Aside from playing with my son and watching him learn and grow, prepping and cooking dinner for my family has been the most fun and rewarding part of my day.

My friend R, who made spectacular stuffed mushrooms for a recent dinner we had together, is rather modest about her cooking abilities. She mentioned that coming up with a new idea every night for dinner was probably the hardest part about cooking for a family. I mentioned my weekly menus and infrequent grocery store trips. I offered to write one for her family and she accepted. This weekly menu presented some unique challenges: she is vegetarian; her husband is not. They both eat eggs so as a way to bridge the gap and make cooking easier on her I suggested breakfast for dinner for one night of the week.

The gravy is lovely as a stand alone. White sausage gravy is creamy and tastes quite a bit more rich than it actually is. Sauteed onions make it sweet and it is kept from being too boring by the addition of bitter, lightly herbaceous celery and sweet thyme. If you’re wondering how they come together I sift the dry biscuit ingredients, then make the gravy, preheat the oven and stick the gravy pan on the back of the stove (next to the oven vent) to keep it warm as I finish getting the biscuits together.

1. Preheat oven to 350. Sift together dry ingredients (including pepper).
2. With your fingers, add butter: delicately pinch it with the flower between your fingers, until dough begins to resemble large, soft sand.
3. Add milk and buttermilk and mix gently until they have been incorporated. Stop mixing the instant the dough no longer feels wet.
4. Using your hands, break off 1/4 of the dough mixture. Roll gently, then flatten into a roughly circular shape roughly 1” thick. From the dough use a circular cutter or the mouth of a glass to cut out three biscuits.
5. Repeat with remaining portions of dough until all the biscuits have been cut out.
6. Spread biscuits out onto an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 20 - 22 minutes, or until cooked through. Be careful not to overcook.

1. Heat a large, heavy bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat and add olive oil. Remove sausage casings, add the meat to the pan and crumble it up. Add pepper.
2. Sear sausage meat and when it is fully cooked through, (about 10 minutes) remove it from the pan and set aside, leaving the fat that has been rendered in the pan.
3. Add celery, onion and thyme and saute over medium heat until the vegetables are cooked through (roughly 5 - 7 minutes). Set vegetables aside with sausage.
4. Turn heat down slightly and melt butter, then add flour and cayenne. Cook, stirring near-constantly, until the flour turns golden. Deglaze pan with beer.
5. Turn heat to low and whisk in milk. Cook for five minutes, then reintroduce sausage and veggies and when everything is warmed through turn off heat. Gravy will thicken upon standing and will loosen the warmer it gets..
Serve gravy over biscuits and accompanied by eggs fried over medium.